Can the Cleveland Clinic save Cleveland?That's the question at the heart of this story in Forbes.Forbes calls the Clinic campus “a gleaming testament to modern medicine stretching out over 46 buildings and covering 167 acres.” During the tenure of CEO Toby Cosgrove, its revenues nearly have doubled to $6.2 billion.“Four minutes down Euclid Avenue from the Clinic is University Hospitals of Cleveland, a $2.3 billion facility also ranked among the nation's finest,” the magazine says of Cleveland's health care assets. “University employs 19,000. A third hospital system, MetroHealth, employs another 6,200.”Tom Gentile, CEO of GE Healthcare Systems, who lived in Cleveland in the early 1990s, tells the magazine, “The whole corridor between University Hospital and the Clinic has regenerated. I barely recognize it. The Clinic has attracted the best physicians in the world. It is a focal point.”But Forbes notes the city has done less well, and 85% of its income tax revenue now comes from people who live in the suburbs. Health care “is the city's saving grace and a key factor in why Moody's Investors Service recently kept an A1 rating on the city's general obligation debt,” according to the story.“Health care has definitely been a stabilizing factor for them,” says Moody's analyst Hetty Chang.The story also notes that Dr. Cosgrove has “pushed to spin off companies from the clinic — 60 of them in the past decade. Together they have raised $700 million in outside equity funding and created 1,000 jobs.”Forbes also looks at the Clinic's significant involvement in launching the Global Center for Health Innovation, which it says is “emerging as an Epcot Center for med tech” with high-profile tenants including GE Healthcare, Siemens, Philips Health Care and Cardinal Health. Dr. Cosgrove personally made a heavy push to attract another key tenant, the Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society, which takes up 30,000 square feet of the facility.“Playing off Cleveland's strength, which is the Clinic, makes a lot more sense than playing off another industry,” one venture capitalist tells Forbes.

Dr. Cosgrove hopes for an economic spark from the Global Center, telling the magazine, “It will begin to influence the city as it comes back and make it a destination medical city.”

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Coming up short Reuters reports that public pension liabilities in five states, including Ohio, “could represent more than 40 percent of their local economies,” according to an analysis released on Tuesday by a conservative group that lowered the assumed rate of return for pensions' investments.The group, State Budget Solutions, which aims to reform budgeting practices by state and local governments, “used a rate of return that is less than half the historical averages that are used by most public pensions,” Reuters says.State Budget Solutions “found retirement systems are short $4.1 trillion to pay future benefits in total, based on a projected rate of return on investments of 3.225 percent, which it said was the 15-year Treasury bond yield on Aug. 21,” according to the story. Historical averages “are usually between 7 percent and 8 percent.”Ohio has the greatest shortfall as a percentage of its gross state product, at 56%, followed by New Mexico, at 53%, according to State Budget Solutions.Reuters notes that conservative political leaders such as U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah who is making a strong push for public pension reform, say pension systems should rely on a "risk-free rate" in line with the yields paid by Treasuries.Using the "risk-free" rate, State Budget Solutions said Ohio has a shortfall at $287.37 billion.More choices: Developers are beginning to see Brooklyn, N.Y., as an alternative office locale for New York's technology and media firms, Bloomberg reports, and that's a good development for Forest City Enterprises Inc.Industrial buildings in Brooklyn “evoke a feel similar to Manhattan's midtown south, where demand has driven rents out of reach for some tenants in those fields, while the borough is experiencing a broader renaissance as retail districts flourish and home prices surge,” according to the story.While the push to expand its office space is just getting off the ground, Brooklyn is already in the midst of a housing and construction boom, Bloomberg notes.The area “enjoys probably the hottest real estate market in the country now, particularly for residential,” says Bruce Ratner, chairman of Forest City Ratner Cos., the New York arm of Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises. In Brooklyn, his company developed a 3.7 million-square-foot campus called MetroTech as well as the Barclays Center, the year-old downtown arena that last month hosted MTV's Video Music Awards.

Credit function:Huntington Bank is getting back in the credit card business.The Wall Street Journal reports that Columbus-based Huntington, a major player in Northeast Ohio's banking scene, today will launch a consumer credit card “that allows customers to choose among rewards in 13 categories or low interest rates on their revolving balances.”The move “reflects the trend of banks setting up one-stop shopping experiences for their customers by offering a wide assortment of financial products,” The Journal says. By not having its own card, “Huntington essentially has been allowing its customers to form relationships with other card-issuing banks.”The new card marks the first time Huntington will issue and service credit card accounts since 1999, when it outsourced those functions for its $585 million portfolio to Chase Manhattan Bank, a predecessor to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Huntington has been completely without a card since 2012, when a relationship with Bank of America ended, the newspaper notes.You are what you eat:This seems obvious, but it's good advice anyway.“People who changed their eating habits for the better following a heart attack tended to live longer than those who stuck to eating not-so-heart-healthy foods in a new U.S. study,” Reuters reports.Among some 4,000 men and women, those whose post-heart attack diets improved the most were 30% less likely to die from any cause and 40% less likely to die of heart disease, compared to those whose diets improved least."This study really suggests that lifestyle changes — specifically those geared toward making changes in your diet — will have an impact," says Dr. David J. Frid, a preventive cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic who was not involved in the study."I think it's something we've assumed for a long time, but we had no compelling data to substantiate it.”You also can follow me on Twitter for more news about business and Northeast Ohio.